Remember when TV was intelligent? I
just finished watching the 1979 TV version of Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the BBC’s masterful
adaptation of John le Carré’s best spy novel. Such
brilliant TV. Slow, deliberate. I particularly like how none
of the
ensemble cast are particularly attractive or pleasant, a
bunch of middle aged doughy miserable men. Who are all fantastic
actors playing nuanced roles, a real joy to watch. While the 2011
film was good, the TV show is great, and I highly recommend
watching it if you can get your hands on
it.

Naturally, Alec Guinness starring as Smiley owns the show. Hell of
a performance, so much so that the actor somewhat stole character away
from the author. But what a richly written character. A central conceit
is that Smiley’s wife Ann sleeps around with other men, and all
his colleagues know it, and he’s by turns humiliated, resigned, and
accepting of his fate as a cuckold. Such misery! It’s delicious.

All of le Carré’s spy novels have misery at the
center. They’re documents from the end of the British
Empire, from when noble men with good intentions are plagued
by bureaucracy, indecision, doubt, ambiguity. It all reminds me of a brilliant
analysis on Bond and Bourne a Metafilter commenter made. James Bond
was the product of the optimistic 50s and 60s, Jason Bourne is a product
of the pessimistic individualistic 80s and 90s. Tinker, Tailor is another
thing, the decrepit outcome of a crumbling English foreign service. It
is well suited to a long, careful BBC treatment.

Sex
House is must-watch Youtube from The Onion. It’s a parody
of vapid reality TV like Big Brother or Jersey Shore: film a bunch
of wacky people living together in a house and see what craziness
ensues! Only this house is not benign, there’s a pall of a Cube horror over the
sexy hijinks.

Each episode is about 8 minutes, there have been seven so far. The
first couple are hysterical but seem a little dumb. Stick with it,
for it goes to a far darker place.

Carpenter’s book is readable and relevant for anyone
interested in gay rights in the US courts, particularly as
how it may play out for future gay marriage debates. He does
a great job explaining the legal arguments and putting them
into the context of the gay rights movement. He also tells the
personal stories of the defendants and lawyers, particularly the
Lambda Legal team who made
the case. There’s a particularly moving description about
how the Supreme Court itself had changed since the bad 1986 decision,
how many of the justices now knew gay people.

The most fun part of the book is all the unknown
weird details about the case. Much of this is available in a
previous article Carpenter wrote (JSTOR; try your library), but
it’s fleshed out more in the book. The defendants in the case,
Lawrence and Garner, weren’t lovers and most likely weren’t
even having the sex that the arresting officers claimed they were having.
They were also 24 years apart and of differing race. All that detail
was buried and the defendants were mostly removed from view in order
to polish up the specific constitutional challenge that ended up in
the Supreme Court. It helped that Texas put up a poor argument for the
anti-gay law; the author suggests that the Houston DA’s heart
wasn’t really in the case.

Reading this book gave me new respect for how hard, expensive, and
detailed the fight for civil rights is in the US. We may be endowed with
certain unalienable Rights, but it takes a lot of effort to convince
the public to not deny them.

Like most of my nerd friends I watched the exciting
landing of the Mars Curiosity
rover. What a show! Amazing tension, engineers accomplishing amazing
things together, and it all worked! But I didn’t watch it on TV,
I couldn’t. NASA TV did have it but Comcast in SF doesn’t
carry that channel.

Instead I watched it as Internet video on my Xbox; Microsoft did an awesome
job covering the event. Great picture on my big
screen TV, Ken and me together on the couch with
a glass of wine in hand. There were lots of other Internet
viewing options; I had my iPad+AppleTV with UStream as a backup.

I like this future where events are edited in
diverse ways and broadcast via hundreds of different
Internet outlets. Between the no-TV Mars landing and the NBCFail
Olympics we have two demonstrations that we don’t really need
TV networks mediating live events. We’ve got a better way.